JOHN Michie is a lucky man. If the actor’s Taggart character knew what his Coronation Street alter ego had been up to, he wouldn’t be held responsible for his actions.

Last week, fans of the soap saw his character Karl Munro set fire to TV’s most famous pub, the Rovers Return, leaving former lover Sunita inside for dead.

Standing over the charred remains of the iconic boozer, he says, deadpan: “It’ll take a while to sort all this.”

The explosive storyline has seen Karl resort to increasingly desperate lengths to win back Rovers landlady Stella.

The former Taggart Detective Inspector Robbie Ross joined the soap in 2011 and was excited to see how Karl turned from affable layabout to killer, who is hailed a hero for saving Stella, played by Michelle Collins, from the fire.

But he reckons that Robbie would hate everything about Karl.

“I saw the scripts and I thought it was a good chance to get stuck into meaty stories and get the acting juices going. He has changed quite a bit, but that’s OK.

“He was just a ne’er do well, a bit of a lazy scally who thought the world owed him a living. Then suddenly he becomes obsessed with Stella and is full of hate for Sunita, who he thinks is responsible for messing up his life after she enticed him into her honey trap. He is desperate to get back with Stella but she has Jason, there’s a lot of jealousy there and all sorts of s*** going on in his mind.

“Robbie would think he is a scumbag. As they say in Glasgow, he would be quite happy to kick his head in in a police cell.”

The Rovers Return goes up in flames (Photo: ITV)

The story is set to run throughout the summer and Karl is driven close to killing again to keep his deadly secret. John is expecting to get some stick from fans for killing off Sunita and firefighter Toni.

He said: “I try to disguise myself when I am walking around. I have got a very good way of disguising myself.

“I got hissed at coming down the stairs the other day from people on a tour of the set. They were saying, ‘oh, you are a bad man’, so I get plenty of that.

“When I went running in the summer I would get quite a lot of that from people about Sunita and Dev, ‘You dirty b****** shagging Sunita. What about Dev, you b******’.

“After all this I am going to have to get a better disguise. The good thing about running is that I can run away from them.

“As long as people don’t take it too seriously. I am sure I will get a lot of it – it will be a new experience.”

John rents a flat in Manchester and returns home to partner Carol, the mum of their three grown-up children, in London, at weekends.

John admits he went to devious lengths himself to woo Carol, a former Hot Gossip dancer.

The pair met on the set of a crisp advert. He was a Burma-born thespian who grew up in Scotland and she was the uber-cool girl who ran with the trendiest and most fashionable crowd in London.

“There’s nothing wrong with a bit of mild stalking,” the 56-year-old said.

“Carol was a dancer, I always had an eye for a dancer. It was pretty instant for me – it wasn’t for her.

“She thought that there would be no way she would ever go out with an actor, she thought that would be a disgrace really.

“She did a lot of stuff on the Kenny Everett show, lots of sketches and things and she had worked with lots of performers and actors and knew they weren’t her cup of tea.

“Carol was part of that London set, while I was doing a Noel Coward play in the West End. She wouldn’t have gone to see anything like that.

“She would be more likely to be out with Boy George and Steve Strange at The Blitz club.

“I thought she was really cool but she was, ‘I’m not going out with you’.”

“I sat next to her at lunch deliberately. I got in there really quickly and made it look like it was accidental.”

Undeterred, he hatched a cunning plan to organise a rock and roll dance night out for the crew.

The night out never happened but it gave him the opportunity to ask Carol for her number.

“She lived near a friend of mine and I just phoned her up and said, ‘I didn’t realise you lived just round the corner from my mate. I am just round the corner, do you fancy going for a coffee?’

“She had just seen her ex boyfriend so she said, ‘I had my make-up on and I was all tarted up so I thought, ah well, why not’. We ended up staying for ages and she said later, ‘I thought you were never going to leave’.

I ended up asking her out for dinner. The first thing I did before we ate was say, ‘let’s pop into this pub and have a quick pint’ and she thought, ‘Oh no. An actor and drinker, it’s not good’.

“But somehow I managed to charm her.”

John with Colin McCreadie in Taggart (Photo: ITV)

Being at Coronation Street and in a big storyline brings a punishing workload. The regime, he admits, is boring.

“Every day this week I am in at 7.45am and do scene after scene after scene. Every now and then you get a break and you can have a sleep in your dressing room.

“I finish at 7.30pm or eight, go home, get something to eat, look at the lines for the next day, learn them, have a bath, go to bed, get up.

“It kind of gets boring. The regime is tough, the actual doing it is great and the people are great.”

And, with a smile and a laugh, he’s out of the Rovers to do another scene.